Quenched entanglement harvesting

Ultracold fermionic atoms in an optical lattice, with a sudden position-dependent change (a quench) in the effective dispersion relation, have been proposed by Rodríguez-Laguna as an analog spacetime test of the Unruh effect. We provide new support for this analog by analyzing the entanglement of a scalar field in a (<a:math xmlns:a="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><a:mrow><a:mn>1</a:mn><a:mo>+</a:mo><a:mn>1</a:mn></a:mrow></a:math>)-dimensional continuum spacetime with a similar quench, and the harvesting of this entanglement by a pair of Unruh-DeWitt detectors. We present numerical evidence that the concurrence and mutual information harvested by the detectors are qualitatively similar to those in Rindler spacetime, but they exhibit a small yet noticeable variation when the energy pulse created by the quench crosses the detectors. These findings provide further motivation to implement the experimental proposal of Rodríguez-Laguna